Conversation 117-007

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Thank you very much.

You gave a big plug yesterday at home speech.

I can't.

I've got to be on defense soil.

She's all clear.

Yeah.

Where are you going?

Uh, yeah, I'm gonna burn it.

Alright, alright.

Well, I think the best suggestion is to hold them down.

Yeah, the license is right down there.

All of our troops, everybody in federal labor, turn around.

Oh, there he was.

We're just one half of that.

Well, they put us in a little bit of a lot of trouble.

I don't think that's a good idea.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

What are you doing?

Thank you.

I don't want to do my job.

My name is .

Put it down.

Turn it off.

Now, we're going to go right away.

We're going to go right away.

We're going to go here.

Thank you.

Come on, man.

Let's light it up.

Because, uh, as the last time I was on the meeting, I kind of, I'm trying to just, kind of build this, uh, down on the very, very difficult problem of Vietnam.

And there's a lot of salesmen here who don't make the duty to try to pull off the first part of the meeting.

I want to discuss the other battle, the battle of the budget, which we will be involved in.

And on that, uh, we will, uh,

I've always told you one page.

In front of you, you'll find a collection of one page, which I'll refer to as a miracle sample.

It's not really what I want to talk to you about this morning.

Vice President Harris and Captain, we have a series of

problems, which we can rather precisely forecast future problems, that we have proposed the administration has to meet in advance.

The President has authorized a program, an action program, which I want to describe to you this morning very briefly.

And each of you will have an appointment either today or tomorrow, members of the Cabinet, as I understand it, with

of the management office of this particular activity to work out your individual participation.

In order to set this in proper context, we have to go back to the 1972 presidential and congressional campaigns.

You will recall those campaigns involved the choice between two diametrically opposite philosophies.

There was a new American majority force on the MPs in those candidates.

You have a very sizable majority of American people who made a selection based on diametrically opposite positions taken by the candidates on expenditures, taxation, welfare, a whole host of domestic issues to say nothing of a very profound division on foreign policy issues.

We hear frequently today that there was a presidential mandate, and then on the other hand, there was a congressional mandate.

And I think as you talk about this, it's important to remember that there were virtually no congressional candidates in this nation who successfully ran on the McGovern platform.

They ran away from the McGovern platform.

They ran away from the McGovern philosophy.

for every American, or amnesty for every draft doctor, or any of the other platform items of the McGovern position.

I make that point because at the same time that we describe the new American majority, we forget to describe the new American minority.

And what we're seeing in this controversy that we're going to talk about here

is an attempt on the part of the new American minority to, in effect, steal the election, to get the fruits of the election, notwithstanding the fact that they were humiliated at the polls by 62-3% of the American people on an issue-oriented campaign.

That's very important to remember because we are being sucked into a debate on several false issues, and that's the thing that I think we should focus on this morning.

The institutional debate, the president versus the Congress, is a false issue.

The merits or demerits of the 15 bills that are described in the package before you is a false issue.

The correct issue here, and the one that we have to take to the people, is the very same package of issues.

that were before the American people in November when they went to the polls, and which they previously have made their decision on in the way they cast their ballots, both in the presidential and the congressional elections.

Now let me just underscore, beware of false issues.

Do not permit yourself in a press conference or debate or any other forum to move to the new American minority's issues.

If you do, you're going to lose every time.

You're going to be sucked into as many false issues that will inevitably weaken the case that we have to put to the American people.

The strategy of the new American minority involves talking about accounting, talking about the legalities of executive privilege,

The Democratic Policy Committee called in a lot of scholars the other day.

There was a story at the start, which you may have seen last night, where one after another, these learned gentlemen, these political scientists came forward and said, well, there isn't any constitutional crisis.

We haven't been able to find one.

And they're absolutely correct.

There isn't a constitutional crisis.

It's interesting that they would be perceptive and articulate on this point.

It looks to me like perhaps

that they're making.

The sophisticates will understand that the true issue here is what the federal government's convenience could do.

But that's not the issue that we can successfully discuss in a minute and a half on network television.

The issue has to be expressed in terms that the viewer will understand in his quick exposure to the problem in a minute and a half.

And that is, of course, should taxes go up?

Should federal government get bigger?

Should we contribute to inflation or should we hold the line?

And that's really what the battle of the budget is all about, to solve the problems of the country responsibly without higher taxes and without inflation.

Now, the second false issue that I mentioned embodied in these one-pages is whether the administration

about the indigent, about the sick, and if we have coming to us for the President's consideration over the period of the next six weeks, 15 adults identified in these one cases.

And they create additional benefits, for instance, for the families of veterans.

And the issue that will be framed by the new American minority for its own purposes,

is whether or not the administration cares about the dependence of veterans.

That is a false issue.

And obviously, these could be the New York opportunities that are going to be created in this program that we're going to explain.

We'll have a chance to pull back off of that false issue to the main issues, set it in context, and talk about it in real and meaningful terms to the average American.

These 15 bad bills are the product of three months' work in the Congress.

At the outset of this Congress, the President predicted that unless the budget is held, the Congress will overrun the budget by some $15 billion.

And true to far, almost exactly 25% of $15 billion is involved in the overrun of any particular bills.

It looks like if they keep up their quarterly average, they're going to come up right on the button at $15 billion over, which on an individual income tax basis, since we raise $100 billion from individual income taxes, would extrapolate to a 15% tax increase for every individual taxpayer.

How do we get this word out?

How do we bring about a correct congressional response to the needs of the time?

How do we get the Congress to go along with the majority of Americans?

We had the same problem two years ago, two and a half years ago, and we tried something that had never been tried before, to the best of our knowledge, by any administration.

We analyzed the 50, where the 50

media centers in the United States were.

Because we had persuaded a Congress that didn't believe in that, that they should adopt revenue sharing.

And we sent administration people of all positions, ranks, and stations to those 50 media centers on a regular basis so that no week went by without somebody in there talking about general revenue sharing, somebody in there talking about special revenue sharing,

press conferences, on talk shows, and in every other media device we could find.

And pretty soon, with the help of the mayors and the governors, the Congress began to get to work.

If I could add one second here, John, for the comfort of those who go out.

Many who went there, including some of the congressmen and senators, thought it wasn't working.

It wasn't helping.

What happens is that, first, you know, what we're aiming at is not to make an interaction, but they're expecting a career in government, and so they expect a call.

And most particularly, the cabinet officers are making a great difference.

You know, they're looking at your assistance and insurance, and others will have to say, oh, gee,

Nevertheless, all is part of the cosmos, so that's a thing you've got to be reassured on every time, and that it's only by this massive way that it would gradually, during the months, you wonder, is it getting across?

Gradually, those change minds, as well as people, but they don't change their minds because they like the color of our eyes.

We had another example, of course, during the campaign for the service program.

And all of you were participants in that.

You can tell me better than I can tell you how that went.

But we know that this kind of regional media attack can be together.

Now, this is not a service program.

This is a presidential spokesman program.

And we're creating in the White House a special office

to assist presidential spokesmen in this effort.

Dave Parker and John Guthrie are here.

I think it would be helpful if they would stand.

You're going to see more of these two gentlemen.

Dave, as you know, handles the president's long-range scheduling.

John works with him.

They are going to give personal attention to the schedules of presidential spokesmen in this effort, and they will be coming around to talk to each one of you today or tomorrow.

The program starts Monday.

It is a six-week, yes, sir.

Why do we don't do this through the national media to avoid the lobbying thing?

Well, we have a, firstly, legal impediment here, which is that we may not spend federal money to lobby a congressman.

We're not lobbying congressmen, although the bottom line of this entire effort for the American people is that whatever their views, whether they agree with you or not, they should write their congressmen their views on this major national issue that you're going to be talking to them about.

You and your people must talk.

You must be careful in all these sort of ways you get in the back.

If you disagree, you should write.

If you agree, you write for the people, you write for the White House, you write for Congress.

Now, Dave and John will try and place a major presidential post in each media center.

each one of the six weeks that we make this effort.

You may be on a television talk show, or a radio talk show, or exposed to a regional press conference, or editorial boards, or any one of a number of forums.

And in some of those forums, you're going to be just answering questions.

Could I ask a question?

I should guess one other thing.

These ideas occur as we go along.

At least the name of this game is not affecting what happens on the schools and the rest of the whole thing.

It does affect the Congress directly.

The name of the game is to see the members of the House and Senate here from home.

Now, if you're going on a talk show and so forth and so on, Maine gets a certain amount of mail to go in, and most Congressmen send their way rather than have this.

So that's important.

On the other hand, a considerable number of congressmen and senators are given loans by the establishment in their town.

So I would strongly urge that, in addition to all the public, it's like everybody, by the way, has distinguished from the campaign, when it didn't make any difference about whether you talked to the establishment or not, but all that mattered in the name of television and making it on the wires, making the campaign.

And here we are trying to get to people who will do something.

You're not just trying to influence the opinion polls and all that sort of thing.

And I would say that each case where you can,

If our spokesman could get out, this is particularly true of cabin officers who have a lead, they'll want to see you.

But if you're going to have your local person, I mean, the big shot, some of you say Kansas City, he gets together there and you sit down with him.

You sit down with these people and off the record section you say, gee, this is a real thing, he needs your help and all that sort of thing.

It should be people that support this, right?

People who support it.

And they say, what can we do?

They say, well, who's going to be in contact?

Call your congressman.

The problem that our House and Senate members are having at the present time, and I know it's been true all these years ago, the problem with me is that

There's a plague of locusts up there at the present time.

The lobbyists and the rest are just running all over the place and sending big bills in to the people who pay them and, frankly, change votes.

What a hexagon.

I know many congressmen and senators where one call from one individual changed it like that.

But you're getting that call.

So we see our people, you know, they sit back and say, gee, isn't that great?

We're sure what you're doing.

We're glad what you're doing.

We're going to hold on.

No time is for us to have another heartache.

Forget it.

You've got to get that guy motivated so that he does something about it.

So I would add, what I'm getting at is, in addition, it's entirely different.

Not totally different, but it's quite different in this sense.

They need to try to affect public identity selections, which are very different.

We can affect public identity where you can set up meetings

After you've made the speech, after you've made the appearance, late in the evening or something like that, or even before it and so forth, where you sit down and for an hour put your feet up and talk to the big shots in that town and say, and you've got to be clear and say, here's what we have to do, and can't you do it?

And you'll be surprised when they say, well, how's that senator doing?

How's that congressman doing?

Say, one, two, three.

Now, there's great temptation as a tagline in this thing to say, write your senator and congressman to support the president.

That's like getting water to run uphill.

We want to move to our strong issues here.

If you put the congressman in a position of having to violate the parochial

in the institution of the Congress, you have not appealed to him on a ground where it's easy for him to exceed your request.

On the other hand, if he is asked to protect the interest of the average citizen versus the special interest, if you ask him to look at the big picture, tax increase versus fuller dining and taxpayer to death with 15 bills,

then you brought him to a ground where at least he'll open his mind to discussion.

So as much as you might be tempted to expressly and vocally support the president as an institution or as an individual,

Resist that temptation and don't let the press suck you into that by a great question.

What we're talking to here is the interest of the new American majority, not the interest of the president or the institution of the presidency as such.

Now, just a couple of other points.

Always express great respect for the Congress.

The average member of the Congress Democrat Republican wants to do what is right.

The average member of the Congress Democrat Republican

knows that what is right is not to exceed this budget.

You find none of them that ran on the platform of raising taxes.

And so, under the circumstances then, what is the problem?

The average member of the Congress has got to get realized when he is debuted by the special interest.

He thinks that's the voice of the people.

So what you've got to do is to let him know that there is another voice, a voice that wants to hear it, so that he can do what is right and what his instincts were telling him to do.

Unless it's true.

But anyway, when it's this way.

And you'll be backed up by very ample rhythm material.

It's just samples.

This kind of material is useful.

You were headed to a Q&A.

You got to know a little bit about these veterans' skills and what's wrong with them and what our record is on veterans.

to care about that particular group of proceedings.

But in addition to that, speech materials, factual materials, materials going to the question of tax increase and budget, and then, of course, indispensable documents to your preparation, your staff's preparation, are the budget documents themselves.

What other things regarding the general event that I want to hear from the start of the meeting?

On the veterans' side, basically the veterans' lobby is very clever.

What they, you see, basically they have very few Vietnam veterans.

They've got a team of veterans.

The people that run the Legion and the VFW are either World War II or Korea.

And those were the hosts.

So consequently, they talk about veterans' benefits and so forth.

They generally are talking about those pen projects like they needed dependents of dependents of dependents all up and down the line of veterans whenever they were in going way back.

The only gut issue that people care about is the Vietnam veteran's education in this job, and the disabled Vietnam veteran, plus the U.S. disabled veterans, but particularly the disabled.

So what you need is an insert here which says, we are taking care of the Vietnam veterans better than anybody else, and we are taking care of the disabled veterans all day, including the Vietnam veterans.

of not doing that.

If you ever get in the position of getting to this, basically, what it is, total health care for all veterans, we can't be for that.

That only affects the Vietnam veterans.

What the public is concerned about is the Vietnam veterans at the moment, and particularly the disabled.

All the disabled, but particularly Vietnam veterans.

The question is, what are you doing for Vietnam veterans?

What are you doing for disabled veterans?

Those are the only things.

What are you doing for service-connected disabilities?

Those are the things that count.

You won't win if you don't make that case at the leading hall or be at the judging hall.

Because there is, in the non-certified activist development, a lot of members of that.

There is that it helped the pendants of people that probably never saw a day of service overseas.

That's what, the way you, the gun issue is the Vietnam veteran and the disabled.

And boy, that tears the people right up.

And if we hear an opposition that says we're not gonna do enough for them, we're gonna lose on that all the way.

The vice president and the cabinet, of course, are the stars of this enterprise, and they are the presidential folks.

But there's an opportunity here for a great deal of advocacy violence.

And each of you, in your departments and agencies,

and very materially, and should very materially help this sector by going back and talking to your assistant secretaries, your deputy assistant secretaries, the people who have sent the invitations, John, to go talk to the American Camping Association.

Typically, when Matt Reed goes to talk to the American Camping Association, he talks to them about parks and about clean rivers and about birds and things.

We ought to go and talk about this issue.

And so when the campers all go home, they'll have a lot of other people who will talk to them about Clean Rivers too.

But we could talk to them about this issue.

We don't indoctrinate, encourage, or orient our lower-level people in the departments to do this.

Likewise, you all have regional directors, regional assistant directors, regional bureau chiefs who

get invitations to the Lions Club and the Rotary Club and to all kinds of speaking groups out in the regions.

And they'll go and talk about the new regulations for social services if you're not careful.

Provide him with the materials.

Ask him for an accounting.

How many talks have they made in the next six weeks from this guy?

Could I add one group that we could not do in the campaign because of their hypersensitivity about political things?

You can go to audiences now.

This is not part of the tune.

This is a general federating one.

It's very important.

And boy, they are.

They never hear it.

They can't hear it.

But on the other hand, they will hear something like this.

First, they're going to also hear Reckless House talking about how they can clean up the air.

That's why they have it.

Or something else.

But other than that, my point is, for those of you who don't know, my point is,

One group that can be highly motivated on this meeting to be attached and standing to the so-called family budget are women.

Because of all the women's forums as much as they want to listen and they want to do something.

And also, they are great letter writers.

I know.

Just to say quickly, what some of our women out there, I know you understand, some of our women, we've got some good women speakers, but get them out talking about this rather than women's rights.

And I can mention food prices, but they can turn food prices and say there's a bigger danger.

The one I'm talking about is a much bigger danger than simply from the rise in the price of meat.

And here's the large amount of people who did a fantastic

rather than just this on this particular point you can get very simple the family budget these are intelligent women they just don't want to sit here you know and go to what are they called in georgia now there's no there's no secret cabal there's a natural instinctive parallel effort by a lot of people who lost the last election now

Who are they?

Well, I think a very quick brush stroke you can describe the new American minority by just running down the list of people that may have heard you as being sort of in the van of this character.

They would be Markey and Church and Senator Hughes and Senator Kennedy and Senator Biden and Tom Winter and Joe Kraft and Hobart Rowan and Daniel Shore and the Brookings folks and Woodcock of the UAW and Ramsey Clark and people of that general persuasion

In the news summary this morning, a very interesting piece, there was an appearance on CBS by Pittsburgh, the New York welfare office, the governmental office, and Jesse Jackson.

They said that in April they were going to make a major effort, a combine,

consisting of George Wiley, the National Welfare Rights Organization, Bush, Jesse Jackson's group, a group of welfare workers.

And they were going to come to Washington, and they were going to fight hard for compassionate humanity in the federal budget.

This is a natural dynamic.

undefined, but very observable new American minority effort.

It's all the same people we saw on television from Miami at the Democratic Convention, but they're not at a convention now.

They're simply moving along parallel lines and with common objectives to bring about a decrease in the

New American majority, taxes, prices, and effective in the most detrimental kind of way.

So this is the invitation that we could, we have an alliance in there, and I presume we don't, with that group of Jesse Jackson and so forth, but we could just set their geography straight.

I don't know why they think they want to march around the White House, but they could just go up in that whole much crowd, go through the halls of Congress, and go up in the galleries and get some food,

I'm sure a lot of you had exposure to this.

Well, we had these long questions and answers sessions with the Congress.

There's an enormous amount of misinformation about what the President said, the three expenditure levels,

I don't know if you all remember when all of us had pitted windshields.

Remember when, what was that, 20, 25 years ago, everybody discovered these windshields were pitted, and there was all kinds of stuff on the paper about it, and you just knew that you were being bombarded by cosmic rays from the Martians, and everybody discovered shit in these windshields.

And it was a very common phenomenon, I guess in Southern California particularly.

We haven't started what's going on right now.

Everything, every bill known to man is attributable to 74 budgets.

And you have to sit down with the mayor, sit down with the governor, and parse out his problems.

And then he discovers that it's because the Congress hasn't passed a continuing resolution that he's not getting his money.

But he had assigned that to the 74 budget.

He had a press conference, and he blasted the president.

So you can get into a number of these facts.

You can do a real job of education.

But the main...

of Senate on the part of the new American majority to the members of the Congress, and particularly the House of Representatives, because let's not kid ourselves, that's where the battle has to be fought for.

Not in the Senate, but in the House, so that every House member hears from that new American majority in his district, which you will galvanize and mobilize by your efforts in the next six weeks, Mike, Rick, John, or whatever you're doing.

Another group with regard to the schedule is important.

I'll have that in mind is this.

While we did very well in all of the states, in Willard, Massachusetts by previous standards, we must remember where the potential boats are here.

Now let's go where the ducks are.

As far as we are concerned, generally speaking, it's very difficult to make a sale in New York, Pennsylvania, and in the East, because basically, despite the fact they were with us, the congressman and senator who had his congressman and senator, the Republican or Democrat from that area, tends to be suspended.

He grew up there.

However, it is easier to make a sale in the South, because you've got two of

but also the Southerners tend to be more conservative.

You'll find that the few editorials that we've had that support us have generally come from Southerners or Midwestern figures.

Put this out hard.

Now, don't get me a wrong impression.

When it comes to subsidizing peanuts or when it comes to the cost of subsidy of the rest, the Southerners are the biggest spenders there are.

But on the other hand, the Southerners, when it comes to some of the social spending, will be with us and

provided you make a statement, so let's cover this out better well.

And I would suggest, too, that I would not limit the, if I were making the speech, I would not limit it totally to the budget.

You want to remember that it's an unpleasant subject.

It has to be described as unpleasant.

always bring in something about the figures if you take them on the mountain top let us let them see the vice president of the street you take on our mountaintop to talk about the historic breakthroughs we've made in our foreign policy and all that sort of thing for the first time in 80 years we're going to peace vietnam they're having a break from this and there but this most important thing is the united states that we're going to continue to play this role and build a piece for the future is to have a strong

free domestic economy.

And essentially that is a subject which is not race-racism or race-taxism.

If you get a little of that in, get the south, get the mid-western areas.

And, uh, but the east, I'd only hit that because people like Delia Richardson come from there, but that's about all.

Not, I mean, not in the west, but, you know,

It seems to me, since I've had to talk to a lot of people, when I go home and otherwise holiday things like that, it's still a little bit .

But seriously, the point that could be made, supplementation of what has been said already, it bears on the split that has herefore existed and is generally

still characterized as a liberal-conservative split.

But I think that a real part of the essence of the new majority is a rejection of what is, for many of us, an obsolete characterization.

I think you could make the point, for example, in the context of social services, that it is liberal

to insist upon strait-tagging regulation imposed from Washington on a myriad of global situations in which a more effective response to human needs can be made by people who know the situation of those in need in their communities, quite to be made by many other kinds of examples.

For instance, the emphasis the administration has placed on an income strategy

which allows individuals to respond to their perception of their own needs rather than having a social worker develop a budget for them.

Is it more liberal to say that a social worker should do this for a person or a family than they should do it for themselves?

There are a lot of other kinds of things that CAP is working on, that I was working on, and AGW are concerned with this.

It seems to me that the very part of the new federalism is it's going to move toward the individual, the yearning of people to feel that they have a voice, that they count, that they exert an impact on the quality of their own lives, and in a sense,

The common denominator of a lot of the protests and alienation in the United States derives from the sense that ours is a great, promoting, personal society that rolls over the individual and submerges it and doesn't listen to him.

And the President, I mean, one of the most effective things that I made in the campaign was one on the point that the President of the United States is the man who is really seeking to return power to the people.

They were, at least my perspective was, that they were picketers outside carrying signs, power to the people.

And I tried to develop the point that, you know, this was what we were doing.

Now, that is, in one sense, is a profoundly traditionally liberal cause.

And I think we ought to make the point over and over again, I tried, I started to,

When I was in the very first one of these reckless press groups I went to back in, uh, just after I went over to AGW, I led with the gambit that, as to, that there was no major issue involving the Department of AGW pending before the Congress today as to which the commonly accepted distinctions between liberals and conservatives were even relevant.

That was an overstatement to some extent, but there's a lot more in it than the vocabulary we generally apply recognizes.

And I think that in the process of articulating the philosophy of the new majority, we should call for a new vocabulary, a new way of looking at it.

and people and problems.

I thought, among the people, I thought the single most important thing you said in your inaugural address was the passage about, which drew together your efforts in the field of foreign policy and domestic policy and said, in effect, that what we're talking about is a redistribution of responsibilities.

This is the essence of the Nixon Doctrine as between the United States and other countries.

And at home, it is the essence of the new federalism, and it is the essence of what is involved in general revenue caring, special revenue caring, the reduction of the multiplicity of federal controls, and so on.

And I think we can go farther than we have in creating the awareness that it is a new approach that doesn't recognize these obsolete

stereotypes in application to the website.

Mr. President, you mentioned yourself.

We have a phenomenon that I should mention, I think, in passing.

I read a number of names.

One name I did not mention, but it's become a sort of personification of constitutional crisis syndrome that's described.

It's under.

There's been some talk about the budget being a frozen course.

I think it's

proper perhaps to describe Senator Irvin as having been enlisted by ideologues to be a kind of a Trojan horse.

From his very learned and sincere discussions of the policy issues, there will come pouring in the dark of night all kinds of consequences.

that I'm sure he does not intend, that his constituents do not intend, and which certainly the American majority does not intend.

There's another Trojan horse here.

You have it before you in these 15 bows.

The Trojan horse, if you remember, was beautifully decorated and was a very attractive object, and the people received it within their peace.

because it was such a beautiful thing.

That could be said of these 15 billows.

If you look at them from the outside, you're for veterans and you're for farmers and you're for the halt and the landing of the disabled and so on.

But it is the Trojan horse from which pours all kinds of very sour consequences when one gets down into what they really want.

So you can work with various kinds of metaphors in this.

I think you may be called out at times to explain Senator Irvin's kind of

through the joke role in this whole congressional state.

He's being pushed out front.

CBS is featuring him every hour on the hour.

He's becoming sort of a Johnny Carson of the nighttime news.

And it's a very obvious device.

He looks right.

He talks right.

He's credible.

He's believable.

And he's on the polling issues.

And so he's very useful to those who want to exploit that particular line.

Mr. President, I have a very quick point here.

The only difference I have on the network is that Ben said that you've got to have something spectacular in the kitchen.

I did it just this morning for 200 agents.

I said, this is a battle between the president and the congressman.

It's not a battle between the president and the congressman.

It's a battle between the governor and the people.

The president's on the side of the people.

And that catches it.

Second, I think it would be very unfortunate, John, if the story gets out,

about what we're doing here.

I think we've got to be careful where we play this, and we'll throw it back.

Six weeks later, somebody will look back and say, gee, they did a snow job here, and they did it quite well.

But the story gets out from our departments that we had this meeting.

We're running a six-week campaign.

We're halfway through what we started.

One of the great difficulties is that we spend a piece of the building builder on another subject that we're not going to work on.

If I could respectfully suggest, I know everybody loves to write and relax and put out materials and so forth, but the main way to really bring in staff and talk to them

I'd say, look, we're going to need to make a few speeches here about this and that and the other thing.

Some will leave.

But the main thing is just not to have some memorandum that gets out then at a meeting and a cabinet and so forth and so on.

It was decided to launch a public relations blitz to get a Congress lobbying presence.

And so I would just suggest that you get a very important point, sort of subtly discreet, and it can be done.

This is a much harder job as president.

And talking of campaign, as you know, somehow the credibility of the people in government is greater during a campaign when it probably should be less.

That's a fact of life.

We're dealing with a very difficult subject, and I think that to simplify,

The issue with Canada and the ways that have been mentioned, particularly by your expanding comments on bringing in those in the larger picture and keeping the speech interesting is important.

It's very easy to get deadly on this subject.

And also brevity on it is a very important thing.

campaign or talk in any respect about government, the more convinced I am that the 20-minute speech is the outside line rather than the inside line.

Once you get up to a half an hour, 40 minutes, you've lost it.

I think we can do some good with it.

I don't think we should get too much ponderous with it, that's all, and I don't think we should

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't think that we should overplay phrases like the new American majority.

I think it has a gimmicky sound that it's done too much.

American majority, as represented by the results of the last election, makes sense, but these

phrases that are picked up and repeated over and over again play sort of in my mind into the hands of our opponents who have really created a whole new lexicon of this kind of stuff.

And I think it serves us well.

Mr. President, can I make a point?

Sure.

With all due respect to John Ehrlichman and his suggestion that what we should do is aim for a minute and a half.

I would like to suggest that what you should aim for is 45 seconds, because I've cut enough film, and know that it is only the President of the United States that's including most of my questions.

That's the terms of wrapping up a key point in 45 seconds.

Go through your speech, and find one or two key points that you want to make, and polish them in colorful language

But make them so attractive to the man who's going to cut this film that he uses it.

And think of it in terms of 0.5 seconds, and you'll stand a far greater chance of getting on the internet.

Basically, that's 75 words.

75 words.

And you're totally right.

It's pretty sure.

President's telling me I've been traveling too much, but I have been around some.

And I think in addition to what John said, sir, on taxes, cost of living, there's another thing, and it's jobs.

And it's a little sophisticated to work in.

The inflationary power gets too big.

And this one, I think, for those that go to the urban areas, and it has, I think, Sam Scott would agree, it would have a way of diffusing some of the minority criticism, which is that

We won't get the vote, but jobs is at stake here.

And even if you don't, you know, in 45 seconds if you say it, you don't have to prove it.

Tax, cost of living, and jobs.

And the job thing is valid economically.

And the job thing is what Pete Brown, I'm sure, would agree if he was here.

It'll help with the Congress where we need it.

So I think that could be worth taking, taking to the urban areas particularly.

It is.

It's the same.

If there's a place where any crowd gets out of hand, then you have a, you know, real downturn.

That's why in your speech, it's always good if you get on the higher end of the line to point out that our new trade legislation is one that's going to stop this one-way street stuff from the United States going to go just down and not up.

And we're going to see that American jobs are protected.

that American markets abroad are opened up so that our exports, of course, can also create jobs in both ways.

We have far more protectionist connections than we will be in one selection.

Mr. President, I just plead on your response.

Mr. President, just that one other view that I've developed in the many times I've been caught up on is we can't win if we get caught up in the defensive.

And this is an answer to some of the such things where

The opponent will pick, as John points out, a little issue.

You'll never be able to deal with it defensively.

Each one has to instead be the basis of that same form, whether it's a positive form or whether it's a defensive form, which means that most of the time the necessity of rising to the

the issue and the policy issues implicit in the total budget rather than those that deal with any individual sort of dramatic error.

There's no winning place on the defensive on this.

The only winning place is to be on the positive on every opportunity there is.

Let me just come up a couple of points that might be interesting.

I think you've certainly developed your own thoughts as to

to stay in his way and the rhetoric that might fit me might not fit you.

But apart from the rhetoric, yeah, following up on what Roy said, spending on dispensing, I doubt that you'd ever get into with the thing about the specific program that you lose.

Every poll shows, for example, one effective thing.

The talk from the audience is the same.

You know, I was noticing the other day a poll that said, say, Colin Harris poll.

Yeah, there's about the same thing.

And the poll asked the American people, in effect, do you pay your more billions of dollars for education?

The answer was 75% yes.

Do you pay your more billions of dollars for health?

The answer was 58% yes.

Excuse me, I'm making your question.

And it's constantly accurate.

Do you favor more the gifts of dollars for the poor?

The answer is yes.

Do you favor more the gifts of dollars for housing?

Yes.

By 70%.

Now, what's the first congressman going to do when he reads that vote?

He's going to vote for right of veto.

He's going to vote for programs and all these things.

So your audience will sit there and say, OK, well, we've lost the battle already.

Then you come back and say, the difficulty is that the pollsters do not ask the right question.

The right question is, are you willing to pay more taxes so that we can increase the budget to spend more business for education?

Are you willing to pay more taxes in order to spend more support?

And the answer there is 72%, 18%.

Do you understand?

Every poll that has been chosen.

So if you put the interest rate in terms of more taxes, now, let's put it in terms of the poor, and here we move from taxes to inflation.

It's a little harder to explain, because present time inflation is a serious problem, and the wholesale price, like, we're not doing so well.

But nevertheless, we have what we want.

That should trigger us to do better.

If there's anything that could be strong,

that could destroy, impair this enormous increase in the number of jobs, and the economy is moving along in a very bad pace now, it would be a new inflationary spiral.

And so therefore, your jobs are at stake.

Second, if there's anything at this time that could be more detrimental to your ability to balance your bank budget,

It will be to let the federal budget run away.

And so your family budget is what's on the line.

And then, of course, your taxes.

So it's your taxes, your prices, and your job.

That is what is at stake in this great debate that's going on over here today.

There's another point I'll make at the end.

Now, on the tax side, on the other side, on the prices side, we all know that if we need to potentially exceed the full employment budget, in other words, if our spending

above $268 billion per second.

And if you do not raise taxes, it will raise prices.

And so what we're talking about here, and that's what you're going to understand, is that instead of these individual programs, the question is not whether you're for competition or for housing and so forth, but how much.

Because we're doing something in all of these fields, and something very, very big.

And the question is the choice.

We always have to make a choice.

I mean, the king wants a new bicycle.

Or the little girl wants a new pair of shoes.

Or somebody wants a new television set.

Everything has got to make the decision.

Can I buy the bicycle?

Can I buy the new fridge?

We want to.

If you take a vote of the family, do you want a new bicycle or votes not to be announced?

But if on the other hand, you take a vote of the family, do you want to buy a new bicycle if your old man's got to write a badge check?

They say, oh no, we don't want him to go to jail.

So what we really come down to here is to put it in those simple terms that everybody can understand.

That is, if this is presented to the public, if the Congress exceeds the President's budget, which is a budget that is not an austerity budget, actually.

It's $13 billion more than last year.

Compared with four years ago, the amount for domestic spending has doubled.

And if the Congress succeeds it, then it means that the Congress is voting for a tax increase or a price increase.

There's no other way that it can be done.

The other point that should be made, too, is that people don't want a tax increase, they don't want a price increase, but they do want all these benefits.

And here we're on tricky ground, very difficult ground.

If you go around, and if you get into the budget numbers like John mentioned, you'll find that you're hoping people will be primarily, they will not want to see, they can't see the big picture.

You don't think about how to see the whole picture.

But if you get down to the business, what about our program?

Therefore, more like a higher education law, because it's really outran and ravened now.

I'll tell you what they're ranting and raving about.

They're not ranting and raving about the amount of money that an education gets.

My God, we're paying too much for our education.

They're ranting and raving because we're doing something that should have been done long ago, and thank God we're doing it.

Instead of giving the money to the institutions, we're providing the funds for the students.

So that the students can choose the institutions.

And so your elitist institutions

who previously had been subsidized by the federal government are all sleeping.

Not because of the money.

Because money is the power.

They don't want it done the other way.

They don't want the students to have that free choice.

They don't want to see it either.

They want to just continue this lot that they've got on the federal children.

And they're not going to continue it.

You can win on that, too.

Let me come to another point.

The whole thing after you've been to a town is that you oppose money for education, you oppose money for the poor, you oppose money for housing, and so forth and so on.

We've lost.

If you even go on, if you only come out of the back,

You reassured people.

You must reassure them that that should be in the lower key.

You reassured people that we are going to have money for housing and all that.

You must say that so that you can show compassion.

Very important to get that issue.

If the debate is ever is who is more compassionate, we lose.

Because the guy that spends more is going to be more compassionate.

What you've got to say is that we are compassionate.

That's what we love to do.

Let's be quite candid about it.

Most wealthy people are smart enough to borrow money.

And most wealthy people know that they get inflation.

That in a few years, that loan could be paid off in cheaper dollars.

Now, from a responsible standpoint, you're a businessman, you're a rich man, and say, stop the inflation.

But it's not going to hurt him much.

The person earns $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, and more, $25,000 even more.

Not that much.

The person that inflation kills, as all of you know, is the poor.

The one that can't hit against it.

The one with the fixed income.

The best thing that we can do for the poor, for the elderly and the rest,

First, where they do pay taxes, and some do, although we take most of the poor out, is to not raise their taxes because it really cuts them.

And the best way we can help them, everybody's, is affected by prices.

Everybody's.

And so we have got to do those things that will avoid a new evolutionary spiral.

You get on the side of the people that way.

But remember, our issue is don't stop the rising prices and stop the rising taxes.

Their issue is being more compassionate to the hungry, the elderly, and so forth.

Be compassionate.

Tell them we aren't compassionate.

But don't ever have that be the debate, because you can't win.

Now, the other point that I'd like to make, however, is that

This is .

We can all talk about, after 100, 80, 90 years of power going to Washington, power is not going to go back to the people.

In other words, power to the people rather than power to Washington.

Good debate.

Good point.

Sophisticated audiences will understand it.

They will.

Because all this business to the effect that the president and this administration is grabbing the power in central Washington is exactly us and the truth.

Revenant.

General Reverend Sherry, and particularly Special Reverend Sherry, is the greatest divestiture of power that any president has asked the American Congress to approve.

Because rather than keeping here in Washington the decision-making with regard to how this governor and how a mayor and how our county in the mix is going to spend money, we're saying, you decide.

So here, this administration is trying to give power back to the people, back to the local people, and they say we're granting power.

They know what the difference is.

Now, the critical question is do they want it?

The answer is probably not.

or a few responsible governors and mayors and so on.

But they'd rather have the buck here.

That's what you have to have in mind.

Because you realize that the power to make these great decisions is going to be with the governor, or with the mayor, or with the county commissioner.

the Board of Supervisors, then he must be a better mayor, a better governor, a better governor than he previously was.

He isn't then just a conduit for Dole asking the federal government to re-elect him, as Lindsay has on a previous case, by how much he got out of Rockefeller and how little he got out of us.

But that's the end of the line.

The whole power right here, you may have been mayor and governor of Silver Hill all the same, but how much am I going to get next year?

More or less.

You can generally assure mayors or governors, generalists, that overall, the special revenue is going to be, the entire government is sharing out its new money, is what it is, overall, the special revenue is going to be,

The cities, the counties, the states, get more in 74 than they did before, but no less.

And it's not very strange, doesn't it, to do what we've cut out?

All right.

First, the power of the people.

We're trying to divest the power rather than grab it in, so you can use that to serve some specific reason.

I could come to another point in your system.

I think you can.

And that is that

As we look at the programs we're cutting out, and I did down in the ghetto, we've got community action and model cities.

Community action and model cities have wonderful sound.

And it's got to hear many others.

They want them.

And they want them not because they're good, but because it's gold.

And they don't see anything replacing it.

But why, for example, why is this administration, as we have moved our model studies, which is over at AGW, as we move them to community action, which of course is an OEO, why is it, say, an OEO?

We kept Head Start increasing.

We kept Manpower Training increasing because those worked.

They help people directly.

Head Start helps kids directly.

And Manpower Training helps people directly and work for them.

But what about community action?

What about model cities?

Sure.

John Ehrlichman has got one in Seattle.

He says it's pretty good.

Jerry Ford, who will vote with us all the way, he's got one in Grand Rapids this evening.

It's just great.

All right.

But we find that about 5% of model city programs pay off.

And as far as community action is concerned,

Community action, of course, is one that has become basically a political partisan thing, which is really an almost horrifying story of bullshit all over the country.

But the way I would tackle that is this.

First, I would say, now let's look at what's happening.

Generals can be reminded that states, counties, and cities, instead of getting less overall, are going to get more, and also they're going to have the power to determine it.

Now, why, Mr. Vice President, or why, Mr. Secretary, why, what about community action?

All right, why are you coming to something like that?

It's one that helps the poor.

Does it?

And here you point out, and I've used this a couple times, and I know it seems to get it across to any of you, maybe not possibly, but I like to take the words of the opposition and twist the phrase, and that's what I think is worth doing.

You remember Franklin D. Roosevelt and all the people who attacked the free enterprise system in the 30s, attacked it on the basis that it was a trickle-down theory.

In other words, you gave it to the rich people and the rest, and it trickled down to the poor folks, the workers, and so it didn't get much.

And that wall, they said, helped the people directly.

And that is what is troubled with community action in common cities.

It's the trickle-down theory of government.

And it trickles down, billions of dollars through layer after layer of bureaucracy, until when you get down here, there's a little bit of it dribbling out of a leaky faucet.

And the poor people only get about 10%.

Now, that's wrong.

We want a money line.

People understand that.

Most of them are on drugs anyway.

But we want to, rather than trickle through the bureaucracy, rather than these millions of dollars being stomped up by bureaucrats who can get us a job, we want to help the poor directly.

That's where Elliott's income strategy comes in.

The whole philosophy of this administration is to get rid of the middleman.

Rather than have it go down through middlemen, down through bureaucrats, we want to help people directly.

And why are we against community actions?

We'll add that model cities, not because there aren't some good, there's always some good in almost any program, but because looking at it in terms of what we get from the dollars that we spend, these programs have not improved out.

And for that reason, what we're doing,

But we're cutting those out so that we will have the funds to help the poor and the need directly.

By cutting out the money that goes to those

We're in the business of helping the poor.

Where are you going to help the poor themselves?

And to put it that way, I would not be defensive about taking the action arrest, and I would take it for granted.

But I, now, I, I can put it around fine.

I wouldn't like that to be the main thing.

The main thing has still got to be, as far as the Congressman and Senator's concerned, he has got to think, before he overrides a veto, he's got to think before he goes for a big spending bill, that if he does, he

He's a base spender and a tax increaser.

He's a base spender and a price increaser.

If that's in the back of his mind, he'll worry.

If only you guys could decide whether this is broken or that one's good.

He won't win because he can win on that philosophically.

It's too confusing except for the intellectuals to understand.

Mr. President, there's one other point that I think is very effective to fight the big lobby, and that is to say that programs that are working the best have the smallest lobby.

The money goes through the pipeline, it's the traders.

When you see a big, strong, affluent, effective lobby, you can pretty well figure out that very little is trickling in.

Very good point.

We'd like to move now, uh, we'll, uh, Paul, this has been very helpful to have some of these things thrown in.

I hope you all handle the distractions pretty well.

Like I said, we'll, uh, we'll all get a purple heart.

But anything worthwhile, of course, the government is working on.

This is a battle.

It's a wildfire.

It really isn't.

It isn't the money so much, but it's the philosophy.

Because those who oppose us here

Those who oppose it have a vested interest in an approach to government which we reject.

And that is an approach to government where Washington does make the decisions, and where you do agree with each of these policies.

And we are trying to change that.

It's a necessary change.

It has to be made.

And if we don't do it, it will never be made.

If after winning the last election, by as much as we did, we fail, it will never be made.

We can do it because all we need is a third of the economy.

We'll sustain the egos.

The egos will be expanding the rails and we have to sustain them.

We won't win them all.

But remember, the next point I think is very, if you're going to get into it,

It's the whole question of, well now, it's only a question of priorities from Congressman Sanders.

He goes to the words for a second.

Why can't we cut the defense budget by $10 billion before Bill takes off, which is a very, very difficult sale for the Congress and Senate, and something you may be asked about.

Let's just address ourselves to that for one moment.

You can say, look, in the year 1972, we went to China.

In the year 1972, we went to Russia and had a little bit of an armamentization agreement with the first one.

And in the year 1972, plus 500 days, we had a war in Vietnam.

So why can't we cut the defense budget by 10 billion dollars?

And the answer is very simple.

There are many complex answers.

The most important answer is why were we successful

Why we were successful in our China initiative.

And more so in the Russian initiative.

Because we were strong.

Because we had something to give, as well as something we wanted to get.

Now, in this critical year, there's going to be another major episode.

It's going to be tougher than the last one.

It's going to be about our implementation.

We're going to have, as Bill will point out to you in another meeting, a series of negotiations that are going to be terribly sensitive with all our allies for the mutual reduction of forces here.

If, if prior to these meetings, which will take place in the summer and fall this year, the Congress of the United States unilaterally cuts our budget, then we may as well cancel the meetings.

And all hope for arms control will be down to two.

Because believe me, they don't do arms control because, the reason we do, we do arms control because we want a little bit of arms.

They do arms control because they fear if they don't, we'll get a hit on them.

It's a cold, dirty proposition.

The same is true with regard to MDFR.

It seems like our forces in Europe, or the Russians in the NATO, when they force all back from theirs, forget it.

Then it means that there will be a unilateral

in the last four years, look what we've done.

We have doubled

The amount of the budget, the percentage of the budget going for domestic purposes.

We have held the amount for military purposes, which means we cut it.

Because of inflation and the cost of long term, we are spending less for the past few days than we have in a month.

I think one figure that's impressive is that we've reduced the armed forces from 3.5 billion

which is the lowest level since 1950.

In other words, we're putting it at the lowest level in the course of the century.

The lowest level in the quarter of the century.

If you want to remember, it was so low in the 1950s, it was a great war.

The other point is that we made an L.A. unit and built it.

We've got a part that we should make with regard to the arms.

Not only have we made that nine percent, but all of it gives us a chance to make it.

No young Americans are being trapped.

Well, I think those two facts are very significant.

One, we don't remember that.

It's costing a little more to take our men into drafting.

And secondly, we actually reduced the defense department, defense establishment by a very large amount.

We can't reduce it anymore.

We've reduced the civilian population, what?

Elliot, a couple hundred thousand, something like that.

So we've made great reductions.

But really the subject that the president wants me to talk about briefly this morning is foreign assistance.

in coming after the discussion we've just had, I think in itself, demonstrates the difficulty that we're going to face because what we've just been talking about is holding the ceilings, not spending more money and so forth.

And when you talk about foreign assistance, it's not that we're thinking about giving money to foreigners and all of that stuff.

Now, we're not really talking about foreign assistance.

We're talking about assistance

for the United States.

We're talking about our foreign policy.

We're talking about supporting the President's foreign policy, which everyone admits has been the most effective, certainly in this century, as far as the United States is concerned.

Why do I say that?

We're talking about Indochina, not just North Vietnam.

We're talking about helping Indochina and Thailand, but I would like to limit it to the moment of Indochina.

Now, before you get thinking about that, let's just take a moment to recall what happened.

When President Nixon took office, we had half a million men in Indochina.

We were in the middle of a war.

It didn't look as if we could actually get ourselves

Had we done it the way our opponents wanted us to do it, we would have been living in, I think, shame for a long time.

Because we'd asked the Dolphins to play alongside us.

and killed because they did what we asked them to do.

If we just pulled out, our foreign policy would have been non-existent.

If we had calmed down in Vietnam, the American people would have been so frustrated and furious, we would have calmed down in the world.

That's what it would have been.

Now let's see what's happened.

We have spent 125, 130 billion dollars

We've had over, well, roughly 50,000 American men and women killed.

What's that figure that we spent in the war?

$130 billion, something like that.

$130 billion spent in the war.

We've had, like, 3 million Americans served in...

What was the United States able to do?

Well our objective was to

And we inherited this objective.

Our objective was to give the people something that would determine their own future.

We had absolutely no other motive.

I'm sure this story is going to argue about whether we should have done it or not, but we did it as a nation.

It wasn't just a Republican nation.

It was actually Democratic leadership at the time, but it was in a sense bipartisan.

So we made the

the decision to carry out our commitment, that was to give those people a right to serve in the future and to get out on a quarterly basis.

In May of 1972, the President said that he was prepared to withdraw all of our men from Vietnam in return for our POWs.

to permit international supervision of the area and to permit the agents, those who live in the area, the Vietnamese and the others, to determine their own future.

Now, what's happened?

And I don't want to go into all the nuances and niceties and I don't want to take too long.

What he proposed at that time has been accomplished.

When he made that statement, everybody in the country, like Mansfield and all the Democratic Congressmen, applauded and said that was a very good proposal and they hoped we were able to succeed.

And we did.

Keep in mind, I was asked at the House Foreign Affairs Committee the other day if the United States made a commitment to provide assistance.

I said, no, we haven't made any commitment in the sense that we're bound by it legally because we told the other side that we had to ask congressional approval.

But we've made a commitment, yes, we've made a commitment to try to get assistance for that whole area.

I said, it was first made by President Johnson, and most everybody in the country approved it.

And later it was made by President Nixon, and everybody supported it, including other candidates.

And yes, we've made a commitment.

We're going to have to carry it out.

And I think when you listen to the evidence and know what it's about, you support us.

I said, you don't have to make it now.

And I think this particularly applies to all of you, particularly in view of the subject we just discussed.

The subject of providing rehabilitation and reconstruction into China isn't going to arise for a while.

We couldn't possibly be ready to make a request in 60 days.

It'll probably be 90 days or longer.

Secondly, we're not going to have to make the request at all unless the peace agreement works.

So we don't have to cross that bridge yet.

And we don't have to keep arguing about it, but it is important.

to think about what has happened.

Any dream is provided that there will be

and be supervisioned by an international commission.

And that international commission considers that this was not an easy task to get other nations to serve, such as Canada, Indonesia, Poland, and Hungary.

Now they take on the general task of having their men sent to Indochina, Vietnam,

They have seven regional headquarters, 26 sub-regional headquarters.

They have their men dispersed throughout Vietnam.

Their purpose is to prevent violations of the ceasefire and see that the agreement's cleared up.

Now, they are there on the representation that we would do all we could to see that the agreement would be lasting.

Looking at the agreement for a moment,

It seeks to do two things, to carry out the presence of what was made.

First, to have a military settlement.

A military settlement is working for getting our P.O.W.s back.

We have this international commission in place.

We are withdrawing our men.

So he has 60 days.

The military part of it, I think, will be carried out.

We'll have our POWs back, I'm quick.

Sure, in my own mind, that'll happen.

North Vietnamese gave us firm assurances in Paris, particularly after the president insisted that they make it clear that we wouldn't have anything else to do with the conference until they made that commitment, and they made it there.

continue to release our POWs, and I think we'll have all our POWs back in 60 days.

We'll have our men out.

Now what's left?

What's left is the possibility that that area of the world can solve its own political problems by discussions.

In order for that to have a chance to work, we have to carry out our part of the deal.

We've got to support the International Commission.

We've got to let them know that we're going to be behind them.

We've got to get the government of South Vietnam to support them.

Canada is talking about withdrawing.

Indonesia is talking about withdrawing.

If that happened, the whole thing would go up in smoke.

We also indicated that we would help in reconstruction rehabilitation.

Now, we have to do that.

We have to do it in a sensible way.

Other nations are going to take part in it.

Not necessarily together with us, but they're going to take part in it.

Maybe they'll work with us.

We're not sure how it will be done.

But we have to go ahead and help.

Because if we don't, the whole thing will be a failure.

If the ICCS pulls out, so there's no international supervision,

If the South Vietnamese feel that we can't provide them with assistance, they can't survive with the government.

If we don't make an honest attempt and succeed in that attempt to provide reconstruction and rehabilitation for North Vietnam, they're not tempted, they won't be tempted to live up to the agreement.

All the nations at the Paris conference agreed to the Paris Agreement with Mrs. Solomon.

They agreed to take part in the activities to support

And most of them stated that they would help in reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Uh, now what are we talking about?

We're talking about a small amount of money compared to the cost of fighting war.

What would you estimate?

About $2 million?

We don't want to estimate anything.

We're not sure that we're ever going to have to, you know, we just don't know.

I didn't mean what you estimated.

Hey, what's the difference in what we're doing currently in fighting peace?

Oh, well.

About $2 million less a year.

Oh, more than that.

I mean, the war, the war, the war was costing, I think, the war between men was costing us $30 million a year, and that's just like, you hear that figure, but that's true, $30 million a year.

And so whatever it is they're talking about is, shall we say, and even putting the outside numbers, which are higher, will be, suppose it's a million, it's 130 million.

The cost of the war, compared to the cost of the peace,

was much, much larger.

This is going to be very small compared to the cost of the war.

Secondly, if we don't provide a system as we indicated we would try to do, then there's a good chance that everything that we fought for will be lost.

I mean, everyone is now pleased about the prisoners of war and the fact that our men are coming home and there is peace.

All of that could be lost if we don't carry out our part of the fighting.

Our part of the fighting was to help reconstruct the new civilization.

Now, that will be over a period of time.

They aren't prepared to accept it, certainly, right away.

They don't know what they want.

So, whatever we do, if we phase out over a number of years, we would have to do it in conjunction with others.

So, Japan makes a large contribution, which they're very anxious to do.

We'll have to consider that.

We'll have to at least coordinate our efforts with them.

The European community wants to help.

We'll have to coordinate our efforts with them and so forth.

But it'll be over a long period of time.

It is the cement that holds the peace agreement together.

Now, if at this point, when everyone is pleased about the fact that we ended the war and we're getting our men home, show up their hands now after we've won the battle.

All we have to do is carry out our part of the bargain, and I think that the Indo-China will hold together.

The present government of the present Jews is in good, sound position.

Everyone who goes there is very much impressed.

The contrast between South Vietnam and North Vietnam is very dramatic.

So all we have to do is go ahead and do what we've said.

Now let me just quickly come in and consider another point.

Suppose we had nothing to do with Vietnam.

Suppose that right now we had the opportunity to get bilateral assistance to check in Slovakia.

Most everybody on the hill would be all for it.

Why don't we, why don't we hang a little anymore in Sydney through Europe?

Why don't we make a small investment to see?

Everybody's very anxious to have his help with Yugoslavia, Romania, and so forth.

Now here's a situation where the North Vietnamese really want us there, surprisingly.

The Russians don't want us there.

For obvious reasons.

So at this Paris conference, they said, we don't even want to talk about a coordinated effort.

We're just for bilateral assistance.

We're going to do what we want to there.

We don't want any understanding of any kind.

North Vietnam, because of their position with Russia, China would like to have us involved.

Not solely, but together with China and Russia.

So even if we have none of these other things which are compelling to argue, it seems to me, I don't think this is a very good argument to make publicly, but I think this is a good argument to make privately with some of these good people.

This is a very good opportunity to gain some influence in North Vietnam at a very small cost.

Not only that, we have to do it anyway.

We're committed to doing it, and it is the one thing that holds our promise for making this peace agreement succeed.

And if we fail to do it, the whole thing may be a failure.

So it would mean that we fought the war for what?

To get our POWs back?

Would we ever justify fighting a war to cause a dimension, just to get our POWs back?

Let's not.

So, this is complete what we've achieved.

And I don't believe when the chips are down that Congress can turn it down.

My governor up there, they suggested he was against it.

I don't think he can.

And I noticed in my testimony the liberals who were sort of critical were all backing off when I asked them.

I said, you mean you're against it?

You won under any circumstances?

No, I didn't say that.

So I think in the final analysis we're going to win.

When you're discussing domestic matters, it seems to me we can say, well, let's wait until we make a decision.

Everybody keep his mind open.

But we think this is a very small price to pay for peace.

and to make the whole war effort worthwhile.

And that's what it's all about.

I'm a little worried about the idea of saying we're committed to doing that.

I think that's the way it is in the trap.

I think we ought to say we're committed to make the peace work and do everything intelligent to make the peace work.

Because once you indicate any commitment to give any next customers, why wasn't that in the agreement?

What's the secret agreement?

It is in the agreement, and we don't make any bones of it, and it is a specific statement in the agreement for that effect.

So what I've got is that agreement.

It's good, but the United States will provide...

to healing out the wounds to war and to help in the rehabilitation of the reconstruction.

Now, what we have said to the Congress, of course they all used this article, and pointed out, even today we point out that this thing has been made clear to the other side that this was only subject to the congressional approval.

I don't think we should use the word commitment, but we have indicated a willingness

We have indicated as an American policy beginning in 1965 that we will participate with other nations in the rehabilitation of all of Indochina.

But of course, in the case of North Kidna, it will depend upon whether they keep the agreement.

That's a very important thing.

For example, if all of their withdrawing their horses from Cambodia, if all their withdrawing their horses from Laos,

You're involved also in complying with the cease-fire.

It stops too, Mr.

Governor.

Well, you understand my concern, Mr. President.

I understand that the idea that I was saying there was some kind of deal made for X number of dollars.

But it is an agreement, Mr. President.

There's no secret agreement.

The statement that I referred to is categorically shaded.

Mr. President, I wanted to follow up on an earlier question.

Vice President Brady spoke of the cost of the war.

The peak level was $30 billion or so, but even in the fiscal 1974 budget, there is $2.9 billion for continuing costs of rising auto investments.

And of that total, $1.9 billion is for our Southeast Asian allies.

Now, presumably, as long as South Vietnam needs to maintain a substantial level of armed forces, as they're probably recovering from what happened the other day, continuing and probably declining the amount out of that 3.9,

But clearly, the more stable the peace, the faster she will be able to reduce is now 1.1 million armed forces, regular army, regional and popular forces, and the Air Force.

There is money there that, to the extent that the piece is stable, could be diverted.

So a lot of the budgeted money is for organs, cells, and bones.

The rate at which, so far this year, the used artillery is just approximately at the rate of two when it sees fire.

We've never seen fires about the north or even over the south right now in this period, and the fighting is precious to all of us, but they're losing killed in action about 200 a week, so there must be killing one, four, five hundred a day or so.

What about the argument of the post-war aid we've given to the former enemy after three years' war?

That's a very good argument to make, and I think we should make it.

But as I said, I would hope that we not engage in too much argument about this.

We just get people looking at themselves between 90 days.

Then when we make the argument, we can make a very strong case about that.

I think that's a very good argument to use in answering questions.

Let me just, there are four points I think ought to be made.

First, we're getting the theorists to start eating.

Bill and I were in the Pacific together, most of the older people.

There were some of us who wasn't.

But I know how I felt about the Japanese.

I'll never forget the first time I landed on Henderson Field.

You know that.

You were the other son.

The easy son.

But anyway, we were at Henderson Field, and I saw that sign which the Marines had put up, you know, where they said along this road, the Marines, and they were all slaughtered, and it was the most brutal.

And they said that they'd run it down.

And we came out of that with a real hatred for the Japanese.

And I haven't felt that way because I grew up in California.

Let me say that after World War II, we took the Japanese, the most militaristic people in the region, and the English, and the Germans, historically the most militaristic and the evilest people in the world, and we ate them.

And the same arguments were made then that are being made now.

Why do we have our enemies?

after they killed all of our people, the Germans particularly, the horrible ones they did prior to the war.

The answer is, we want a peaceful Japan, allied with the United States.

Here we're not going to do that.

Or we want a new aggression to develop in the United States of England.

And the same with Germany.

And it would be Japan and Germany doing another argument if we didn't help them.

They fall like a right plum for the names of the countries.

It's related to what Bill said.

The point is, the investment in Japan and Germany was one of the best investments in Japan.

It was billions of dollars.

Now, as a result of that investment, they are strong, free world partners.

So strong, as a matter of fact, there are major competitors in the world behind them.

That's my second point.

With regard to this, Steve, and this is each of the questions that Congress is going to try to pick up.

One, other nations are already pledged to help.

They want to know that they are.

Yes.

Other things are already pledged.

How much?

Dependence on the whole situation is what we have dependence on.

And I say we have dependence.

The Japanese and several European countries are pledged to help.

And after World War II, nobody helped but America.

So that's very important.

Second point is that the funds that we have, whatever the program is,

will not require any shrinking or any reduction of current domestic budget percentage points.

It will come out of our national security and defense budget.

It's going to be tough, but that's where it's going to come.

So in other words, the point is that the way we help these people that are going to have to reduce the budget burden, but we're going to ask, we help these people, it's going to come out of what we call our national security budget.

The point is that after all this law and the cost of law, it's to the interest of the United States.

This is not reparations.

You don't have to justify it on humanitarian grounds because there'll be some horror stories and there's no reason to justify them.

But it's just as there were some pretty horrible stories about that town and so forth, about the Germans, and yet we helped them.

Here in this instance, you have to remember that our assistance to North Vietnam

is will be conditioned upon their comply with the peace agreement and it is worth having this peace agreement work worth it because of the effect in saudi on the fact of cambodia and the fact of laos let alone on thailand where we have a treaty and what happened when they called them in the event the north vietnamese resurgently went in there but no one making sure we have a treaty and so on so what they're really coming down to is this that we

The investment in World War II was one of the best investments in peace you've ever made.

This investment in this miserable part of the world is basically the best investment in peace that we've made on that basis as a member of the United States of America.

So, Mr. President, I want to read this.

So there's no misunderstanding that everybody in this country understood, based on what President Johnson said, President Nixon said, that we would undertake a program of reconstruction and rehabilitation.

And before we got the peace agreement, we wouldn't have gotten

2% of the people voted.

Now these fellow senators, these late Congressors, are just doing this for political purposes, but I want to make it clear that here's what the article said.

The United States anticipates that this agreement will usher in an era of reconciliation with the Democratic, Republican, Vietnam, that's North Korea.

As with all the beaters of China, in pursuance of its traditional policy, this is Anne's point, in pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute

to healing the wounds of war, and to post-war reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, as you are in turn.

No, we don't evacuate from that.

This is what everybody was in favor of.

We wanted to get the peace agreement.

And we don't get it because, I don't think we, we didn't pay that as a price to get it.

We don't need to say that.

But the point is, we put that in agreement because we, our, I'll have to say a couple of us, Bill remembers, we had a meeting here with some, I don't know if you were here, it was a meeting with the legislative leaders.

And one, I would say usually very intelligent,

asked a rather stupid question.

He said, well, what about getting the Chinese and the Russians to help us out?

Now, that's a kind of marvelous argument.

I think the first question is, we don't want them there yet.

And the minute you have the Russians, you have Russian advisors, Chinese advisors throughout Vietnam, down.

And the fact that we're going to be in the north just still points out that the Russians don't want to stay.

So the Chinese stay for other reasons.

I think so.

We can't say that.

But my point is that they don't get sucked into the idea that the Russians or the Chinese, they will help them out, and other nations will help them out.

But we're going to take the responsibility to help them out.

And it's not the others who are going to help them stop.

The Japanese are going to help them stop, right?

Mr. President, I think that on the other side, you know, what you just read, not that I didn't know that that was generally an agreement, but the public is being given the impression

because of the emphasis on the reparations thing.

And our necessity to be defensive of that, it's not reparations.

There is nothing in the agreement that commits us to writing.

I have a speech, too.

I have a line on that.

Go ahead.

Let me say it.

You've said it 200 times.

I'm really just a television.

You let me carry it that much.

Why don't we make our case and we've got to continue it?

I was telling the president, Spike Mansfield, and Justice Blinken, and Paris Thompson, and Hugh Scott, and others, and Mansfield said, look it, forget all the things that are being said now.

If this can hold off for 90 days, he said, I feel sure that I'll get it to the Senate.

There's only one problem.

I was raised, and I've had to go through the repression of the Congress, who basically is sort of a hard-line office and so forth, and you might expect isolationist views, but in any event, it's better for me to do what I want to do.

That's what I would say to be either strong or weak.

The point that I make is that, hey,

They, they were, some of that, you know, they go home, and they, and it's, it's a great account of opportunity, and you've got a huge applause line to say, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one.

So the main thing to your Congress, to our Congress and Senators was you've got to tell them, don't come down.

Wait.

Hold off.

Because I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've

And I said, you wrote a letter?

Yeah.

She said, I wrote a letter to a very important person.

And I wrote the letter.

I can't change my mind.

So we must meet with the right letters.

We must meet with the speeches.

That means have adjourned.

But I don't know.

It strikes me that one of the arguments of the PDs, especially, is that when we impose aid to Vietnam, our critics are playing politics of peace.

The aid is not provided, if I can interrupt you John, the aid is not provided, they must take the responsibility for the piece put down, too, because if you, let's put it, if I can, the thing that Phil made, in fact,

Why should the United States want to be on there in any kind of a bilateral basis?

Why not do it all through the United Nations?

The United Nations is an influence anybody.

If you ask, this is my year, as far as John said, our two different cases.

But the reason that the United States

needs to have an aid program and an assistance program with North Vietnam, very directly, because then we've got something to influence them.

If they, for example, start making a run in Cambodia after they, we hope, get out, or another run in Vietnam, we can say, all right, out.

And otherwise, you wouldn't have a stroke.

Go ahead.

And if the peace becomes unraveled, that ban that this congressman insists on his district isn't going to be the ban.

That's right.

And so if at the critical moment, when the negotiations were teetering on the razor's edge, you had rejected the peace terms,

because he declined to commit to the United States a fee decade that we would give post-4A.

These same critics would have been leaving 10,000 marchers out in front of the White House gates demanding that you pledge billions of dollars in order to end the war and bring our prisoners home.

So this is why it is basically immoral for them now to take this position, and what they're doing is playing politics with me.

Well, if I could say, John, if you want to go back and read history, what you were covering at that time as an objective, go back to the media.

Mr. President, I'd like to get it clear.

Do you want this message tied in with the one that John Ehrlichman discussed?

No, thank you.

No.

What I'm suggesting here is this.

The reason we're staying on the defense policy is that when you do go out and get questions, you'll get a question on it.

I want you to be in a position to answer the question.

I will not conclude this part of your speech.

What I would like to see you conclude this part of your speech is that, as the Vice President already indicated, don't just go in and rumble around, you know, about the budget.

That's a dozen.

I would go in and say, we're going pretty well in the world at the present time.

We've had historic breakthroughs in the fields of peace and so forth.

The United States is now the leader of the world.

We have a nation building up with the Soviet and with the Chinese, and we've got peace for the first time in a million years.

But now is the critical time to see that we don't blow it.

We've got the economy moving up and so forth.

Let's don't blow it by a budget which raises taxes, raises prices, costs us jobs, and destroys this great economic power, which is essential if we're going to be an effective world leader.

That's what we ought to do.

on the subject of reparations, I think the questions asked about reparations are proven.

We're not even going to talk about amounts and programs until after the POWs are back.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's not the purpose of those things.

The date is the 28th of March.

What is the 28th of March?

There's just no discussion.

If we want to have reparations, we would have to make the deal ahead of time.

Right.

No, so all we did was exactly what stated in this agreement.

That is, we would, essentially, without traditional policy, we would, uh, we would make our hand on this.

Our hand would bail us, bail us out of the department.

That's right.

that the field of your release is not conditioned on anything else, except the withdrawal of our forces.

Absolutely nothing else.

None of us who survived Vietnam, none of us who those were their political prisoners, that's what this last hand up was about.

They were trying to link something that we had rejected before, to refuse releasing civilian prisoners, thugs, and a lot of other people, and made us on the ship and put them in jail.

But nevertheless, whatever the case is, they were trying to say, he's got to release these civilian prisoners before we'll send back to B.O.W.

If we say no dice, why?

Because we had a clear-cut thinking, we'll withdraw our forces in 60 days if you return our B.O.W.

That's all there was.

There was no linkage.

And that meat carried on.

Now we had a little sick faucet there.

I'd worry more about the defense budget, sure.

But I'm really very considerably concerned that the whole bid on the incumbent and the whole of the line is not cut.

There's some areas in the message that someone has to deal with.

The whole demand for getting the money out of the defense.

There are facts such as that statement.

overall manpower level for fiscal 74 would be at the lowest level since 1950.

That the proportion of the total federal budget represented by the dissent share would also be at the lowest level since 1950.

The lowest share of the PNP since the same period.

I would like, John, to send you a little sheet that could be distributed for that purpose.

But there's another point you made, the President's touched on, but I think

If you looked at, if you put it in what I thought was a very effective manner in a column I wrote the other day, we are in a sense confronting problems arising from the very success of the President's foreign policy initiatives.

There is an atmosphere of big talk.

There is a sense that we are moving into a world where we don't need all these piled-up arms and all these men in uniform.

Have we had a soil agreement?

Have we achieved peace in South Vietnam?

Are we not negotiating in Europe for mutual balance for production?

What about the European countries on cooperation, security, and so on?

Well, these are the fruits of the initiatives taken by the president as part of the year of negotiations.

But these successes were achieved in the pursuit of the year of negotiations so far because, as the president said, we had strength.

Because it was possible to negotiate on a basis that allowed us to give in return for what we got.

And for us now to cut below the levels that are now in the budget would be to take away from the present the very tools that have brought the degree of success so far achieved and yet

In each instance, we need still to pursue the objectives that have been partially won.

We've had SALT I yet, but we are in the process of going into negotiations of SALT II.

Useful balance force reduction negotiations are at a very early stage.

We need to be in a position to assure the observation of these pieces, and so on.

nothing would signal more clearly an inability of the United States to back up its negotiations to effectively then force the Congress to force due to lateral reductions below the levels that are on the budget.

There's another point there, too, Mr. President.

To have diplomatic credibility, you have to have strength.

And to have an advantageous trade position, you must have diplomatic credibility.

And it hooks into the domestic picture that you can't have a weak foreign policy and a weak posture in the world and still compete in an economic sense in the world.

One of your predecessors, Louis Johnson, learned that?

Yeah.

How many did you marry, Johnson?

I had about $11 million back then.

That's why I didn't want to be known as Louis Johnson.

I was just going to say that I see some encouraging signs among the more liberal, intellectual-type commentators of his Christian awareness of the

the inseparability of military capacity and foreign policy objectives, this seems to be sinking in.

And I think we need to find ways to say this.

The carrier task force in the Mediterranean

forms a deterrent from a peacekeeping culture and it maintains a presence which in itself contributes to preserving a balance.

We are not able to do that.

The whole situation tips.

If Europeans come to feel that the only powerful military presence in Europe is the Soviet Union,

their whole orientation shifts.

And that then becomes a dangerous world.

The American people themselves are not going to want to see a situation in which the balance has shifted.

A survey for Congress has been established to begin seeing the development of sort of a cornered rat syndrome.

And we'll start searching back over in the opposite direction.

We have met the risk of real confrontation.

There's one other item that I would like to include in your round of speeches about the budget, and it's very important.

We have the law enforcement going on next week, and I'm going to make a radio statement tomorrow.

It's very hard law.

It's hard law because I believe in Bill here this morning.

I had the Secretary of State

as he did to some of my total friends.

He didn't have to ask me because he knew I'd vote.

To say that the terrorists who killed our ambassador and his assistant in Sudan could be given the death penalty and then have Serhan Serhan in life in prison.

Now, uh, I know, uh, on my staff, in places where people honestly don't believe us, and some, for some reason, some, for others, people have to do this stuff because they don't think it'll work.

But I just say that I am convinced that we have to move, and Attorney, uh, Attorney General has spoken to the point that we're going to send legislation down.

It's going to be good legislation.

And also, as we've decided to step up the benefits of the drug deal,

I'd like to have everybody include a couple of paragraphs, a minute or two, on that subject as well, when you're out on your speeches.

Because it's an area that's very difficult to develop, and the polls are recently different.

By a factor of two to one, the general public is not aware of, or that we are doing anything to improve the law enforcement.

Another reason is that you never succeed.

There will always be crime, because there are always bad people, the social scientists and the country understand.

And so under those circumstances, society doesn't grow, and people are just that way.

But my point is, here, just throw that one in, too.

There's one statistic in your speech that says the president of Mexico is the first president in 13 years.

that presided over a country that did not have an increase in the crime rate.

As a matter of fact, most of their binaries is going down.

Just say that to a nice guy.

One other thing I think everybody should keep in mind is that you shouldn't say, but the only place in the world today where our diplomats feel safe are communist countries.

There's no security problem in any of these countries.

In every other country in the world, we have the guards, the alarms.

Now that is ironic and sad.

Would you realize that's a fact?

Mr. President, if people just saw, if people could remember, right after, before we went to China, we had so many letters here to a church.

saying, oh, that's just terrible, it's such a risk, and we really shouldn't go, and all that sort of stuff.

And so I did write the facts along those lines.

He didn't need any Secret Service at all.

In other words, you can increase that.

In other words, he has the right to be a politician.

What you're saying is in our emergency procedures on the church and the airplanes,

We had the first example this week of how right we were in Spokane.

We had a man tell his wife, he rented a car, went to the airport, demanded an airplane.

There was a local policeman on guard who had just completed our FAA school, and he managed to keep the moon to man and did, in fact, keep anything serious from happening.

The man never got near an airplane, but the fact we had a training man there who'd been to our school, I think foreclosed where it happened.

But you know, Jamie, just to look you in the eye, I felt a great pleasure for me to have to represent the Congress, the legislature, that will make it possible to insert major crimes when it comes to punishment.

And to raise the punishment of the drug pushers and so forth in ways that instead of having soft-headed judges and probation officers send them out in the streets, basically,

And on the other hand, if anybody's got a better answer, I'll be glad to hear it.

We tried the other way for years.

The world is a magnet.

The law is the enemy.

And society is divided.

And crime is skyrocketing.

Now, for the four years we've tried it this way, it's begun to work.

And we're going to give it another good whirl now if it finds its people today.

Thank you.

Now that's pretty nice.

Thank you.